October 7, 2009

The Wrongful Detention of Fouad Al-Rabiah

Journalist and author Andy Worthington recently posted a great piece on a detainee I have to confess I had never heard of before, Fouad al-Rabiah. Al-Rabiah has been held in Guantanamo since 2002, but it turns out he is completely innocent (surprise, surprise) and that the charges against him are ridiculous.

The whole piece is very long, with Worthington taking the time to unpick all the SERE-derived confessions, but if you have 20 minutes or so to spare, it is well worth a read.

The “highlight” is a quote from from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly about the sheer implausibility of what Al-Rabiah was tortured into confessing:

The Court agrees with the assessment of al-Rabiah’s interrogators, as well as al-Rabiah’s counsel in this case, that al-Rabiah’s confessions are not credible. Even beyond the countless inconsistencies associated with his confessions that interrogators identified throughout his years of detention, the confessions are also entirely incredible. The evidence in the record reflects that, in 2001, al-Rabiah was a 43 year old who was overweight, suffered from health problems, and had no known history of terrorist activities or links to terrorist activities. He had no military experience except for two weeks of compulsory basic training in Kuwait, after which he received a medical exemption. He had never traveled to Afghanistan prior to 2001. Given these facts, it defied logic that in October 2001, after completing a two-week leave form at Kuwait Airlines where he had worked for twenty years, al-Rabiah traveled to Tora Bora and began telling senior al-Qaeda leaders how they should organize their supplies in a six square mile mountain complex that he had never previously seen and that was occupied by people whom he had never met, while at the same time acting as a supply logistician and mediator of disputes that arose among various fighting factions.